Notes

1] In the preface of Mary Shelley's History of a Six Weeks Tour (1817), Shelley writes: "the poem was composed under the immediate impression of the deep and powerful feelings excited by the objects which it attempts to describe; and, as an undisciplined overflowing of the soul, rests its claim to approbation on an attempt to imitate the untamable wildness and inaccessible solemnity from which those feelings sprang." Shelley's prose account of his reaction to the first sight of Mont Blanc is in a letter written on July 24 to T. L. Peacock.1-2.: For a prose exposition of what Shelley calls "the intellectual philosophy," see his essay On Life: "I confess that I am one of those who am unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived .... The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by the names of ideas and of external objects. ... The existence of distinct individual minds ... is likewise found to be a delusion. The words, I, you, they, are ... merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind. ... By the word things is to be understood any object of thought. ... The relations of things remain unchanged [in the intellectual philosophy]; and such is the material of our knowledge." Back to Line

53] Unfurl'd. "Rolled back" or merely "furled" is the meaning required by the sense of the passage. "Upfurled" has been suggested as the word Shelley intended. Back to Line

79] But for such faith. A surviving pencil draft of the poem reads "in such a faith," which confirms the likelihood that this phrase is intended to mean "even with such faith alone," rather than "except for such faith." Back to Line